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Friday, December 26, 2014

Only 6 days before the new year starts, I'm so excited for it. I made this long list of books I'm planning to read, we can say they are my bookish goals for 2015. it contains more than 50 book, with all those books I wished I did read before. I chosed books in different gendras: children literature, fantasy, science fiction, fiction and non-fiction, there is no young adult, I think I have read enough of it this year. the books are also in different languages, well the languages I know, English, Arabic, French and a book in Spanish, my first book in Spanish, I don't know if I 'm ready to read a book in Spanish, but I'm going to try.

However before the new year starts, I need to finish the three books I'm currently reading: Attachments by Rainbow Rowell, Sense and sensibility by Jane Austen, and الاسود يليق بك by احلام مستغانمي.

Sunday, December 21, 2014

Women in love by D. H. Lawrence is the first
classic book I read, without a teacher telling me so. I read before classics
because I should, they were part of the school assignments. I didn’t enjoy them
much. I always thought they were long, boring, written with a really
sophisticated style, using some ancient adjectives that you can’t even find in
the dictionary.

This book was no exception, it contains (in my version) 542
page, the first half of it was so boring, and after reading two pages of it I
had already giving up using the dictionary, I couldn’t find the meaning of most
of the words I was looking for. The only thing that did give me strength to
continue reading was this article, I had read about reasons you should be reading the classics, other than: Because we said so. Thanks to this article I
didn’t give up reading, and I’m glad I didn’t, because the second half of the
book was so interesting, and I enjoyed reading it.

The story follows the relationships of Ursula
Brangwen and her sister Gudrun with their lovers Rupert Birkin and Gerald. I
got really attached to those four characters, after reading 542 page about them, I feel like I know them personally, I don’t love them or hate them I just know
them.

Those are some aspects in this book that I did
really enjoy:

The high intellectual discussions between the
characters.

The way the author would show us their dark
side and their anger; “A sudden desire leapt in his heart to kill her”, “What a
perfect voluptuous consummation it would be to strangle her”

I liked the way the writer would express the sadness, the depression, the happiness , the feelings of the characters ; “He would overlook the old grief, he would put
away the old ethic, he would be free in his new state”, “Was not death
infinitely more lovely and noble than such a life? A life of barren routine,
without inner meaning, without any real significance”, “The only window was
death. One should look out on the great dark sky of death with emotion, as one
looked out of the class room window as a child, and seen perfect freedom in the
outside.”, “Sometimes I think it is a curse to be alive”

I loved how the author would dedicate an entire
chapter to discuss some deep ideas as love, death, life, faith.

The book is composed of 31 chapters, I enjoyed
most the last chapters, but there is also this chapter that I think is my
favorite, about Gerald and his dad, both really successful industrialists,
where the author did a comparison between their perspective on work and
religion.

This book was definitely not an easy read for
me, sometimes I felt really confused. I couldn’t tell if they loved or hated
each other, there was also this complex relationship between the two male
characters I couldn't understand is it just strong friendship or more? In this quote Birkin was trying to explain it
to Ursula “having you, I can live all my life without anybody else, any other
sheer intimacy. But to make it complete, really happy, I wanted eternal union
with a man too: another kind of love”

Sometimes the characters would talk to each
other in a different language, I didn’t have a problem when they used French,
but when they use other than French, I’m like how am I supposed to know what
they are talking about? And how much language do those characters know?

Overall I enjoyed this book much more than I
thought, I have already started reading another classic book , it’s Sense
and sensibility by JANE AUSTEN, I kind of understand now why people still read
those books, they are as fun as the other books but in many ways they are much
more interesting.

Saturday, December 20, 2014

In this
post I’ll be reviewing books written by two of my favorite young adult authors,
Rainbow Rowell and John Green.

Let’s
start with John Green:

So Will Grayson, Will Grayson
is the third book I read by John Green, after Looking for Alaska and The fault
in our stars, and my first book by David Levithan. The book is collaboration
between the two writers. The story has two main characters, there is John
Green’s Will Grayson which is the narrator of the odd-numbered chapters, I
liked him best because of his genius two rules, we, him and I, kind of have the
same principles in life, kind of, and there is David Levithan’s Will Grayson
the narrator of the even-numbered chapters, which I thought was mean but I
changed my opinion on him after I got to know him better through the book. I
picked this book basically because I wanted to know more about the books
written by John Green. Before starting reading I didn’t check any reviews on
the book in the internet, the thing that I normally don’t do, and I didn’t know
that there was two narrators, which was so confusing at first, I didn’t
recognize there was two Will Graysons until the meeting of the two in that weird
shop, I kind of felt stupid it was obvious that they were different
personalities, they lived in different places, and had different friends. The
weird thing was that I lost all interest in finishing the book after that the
things became clear to me; I don’t know how I managed to finish it? I think
the main reason for my sudden disinterest in the story was that the it become
all around Tiny (Tiny Cooper is the best friend of John Green’s Will and the
love interest of David Levithan’s Will.) and the two Wills become secondary
characters, they were still narrators but Tiny was all they were talking about,
and things become not that interesting for me to follow, that’s when I noticed
that the same thing happened to me when Alaska died in Looking for Alaska
and when August died in The fault in our stars those two events made me
care less about how the books will end, I don’t regret reading all those books
I enjoyed reading them, it’s just that the end of the three books was not as
fun or as interesting as the beginning of them.

I liked this fanart about Will
Grayson, Will Grayson so I wanted to share it:

The second book I read is Eleanor
and Park by Rainbow Rowell:

I loved so much Fangirl my first
book by Rainbow Rowell, I couldn’t help not to read another book by her, so I
picked Eleanor and Park and I wasn’t disappointed, I loved it so much.

The book tells the love story of those two high school students, park: a
cute Asian boy (he is half Korean), and Eleanor: the new girl at his school. They
met at the bus school when Eleanor sits next to Park, I loved how slowly their
relationship develops and how they discover their mutual love for comics and
music, I loved how awkward they felt around each other. There are other aspects
that made this book so interesting:

1. The story takes place in 1986, with no cell phones or internet, if they
wanted to talk they needed to meet, and because of Eleanor's family that wasn’t
easy.

2. The narrator speaks from the point of view of both protagonists which
gives a full vision of what they both felt.

3. The characters were so real, they dealt with the some big issues, they
made me realize that there are poor people also living in America.

For me the book was perfect, beside the little shock in the end. the end
of the book was so confusing for me, I’m not a native english speaker and my
level in English is modest, so I kept rereading the last chapter thinking maybe
I missed something ,or maybe I didn’t understand the meaning well, or my
version of the book is not complete, but no that was the ending, and after some
thinking the love story between Eleanor and Park did end.Eleanor took the decision of sending
a postcard to park after a year of not answering his letters, for me that was an
end to their love story maybe happy, maybe sad we don’t know it was up to what
Eleanor wrote on that postcard and how Park would react to it, but what did
upset me was that I wanted to know what happened to Eleanor’s family; her mom,
her sister, her brothers what happened to hers stepdad ( I really wanted him to
end up in jail), I wanted to know more about Park's parents, their story especially his mom's story (actually I liked Park’s parents more than I liked Park). well all in all I wasn’t prepared to this kind of end, which made me
sad but that didn’t stop me from reading another book by Rainbow Rowell because
I just love her writing.

I think as I made it clear I’m done with reading for John Green, maybe
in the far future I will think about reading again for him, as for Rainbow
Rowell I will not feel happy until I finish reading all of the books she ever
wrote.